Professors at law schools are overwhelming left-liberal, as I made clear in a 2005 study published in the Georgetown Law Review. Just as it was said in the late nineteenth century that the Anglican Church was the Conservative Party at prayer, our law schools today are the Democratic Party at the podium. The hard resulting policy question is whether law schools should adopt affirmative action for libertarians and conservatives to foster the debate that should inform legal subjects with a substantial political valence.

While I have not supported preferences of this kind, the strongest arguments in their favor are the existence of preferential policies in favor of race, gender, and ethnicity that are themselves justified as a way of creating a fuller debate. Indeed, one particularly powerful point—rarely if ever made made—is that the widespread intentional discrimination in favor of certain preferred groups in faculty hiring has a disparate impact on conservative and libertarians and reduces their presence at law schools. That is, since minority and female law professors are likely to be even more left-liberal than white males, the routine diversity policies of law schools decrease the number of conservatives and libertarians compared to a baseline of purely merit selection.

A new study of the ideological imbalance in the legal academy, The Legal Academy’s Ideological Uniformity, provides hard statistical support for this proposition. It shows that minority and female faculty members are indeed substantially more likely to be left-liberal than white males and be even more left-wing. Racial and gender diversity does reduce ideological diversity.

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